People in pop science like to think of Evolution religiously as this constant refinement process creating better and better organisms over millions of years, but what if evolution is more like a Coin spiral well? As the coin loses more and more momentum as it gets closer to the centre, it eventually collapses, similarly living things have lost a HUGE amount of genetic potential since the age of the Dinosaurs.
Take Pterosaurs for example, the largest flying animals to ever exist. X-Rays of their fossils show their bones had hollow pillar filled cavitiea that made them both ultra lightweight and extremely strong and capable of supporting large necks and musclemass. No living creature today possesses this biomechanism, because it vanished in the Cretacious extinction where every animal above 25kg went extinct. And we see the genetic restrictions from this event millions of years later. MAMMALS for example have baked in genes for Nocturnal lifestyles, including shitty colour cones and eyesight, reduced pigment (most mammals are a shade of grey or brown, save for things like Lions or White people who are blond/red), and other traits. Australopithecus Boisei, our hominid relative, evolved an enormous jaw despite only eating grasses because it lacked the genetic potential to evolve incisor teeth that cows and Horses have. BIRDs almost uniformly have Beaks due to a single genetic defect related to tooth development that affects the entire Avian family. All of avian evolution centers around this defect. Living things are not evolving better and better, they're more like a limestone cliff being eroded by waves - they are losing more and more of their biological potential as time goes on, because Evolution is not a process made by a God from on-high, it is a geophysical process just like a tsunami or a hurricane, and just like those things eventually its going to run out of juice and collapse - UNLESS humankind can replace it with something better. Thoughts?
Seems more like a fluke or accident, not the result of long term evolution. There's even evidence that some dinosaurs had cognitive abilities on par with Chimpanzees, our closest relatives. And if you look at who is favoured in natural selection in the modern era, it is almost always lower IQ level males while high IQs rarely have sex and need to pair bond or have an ideology behind their existence or they end up being nihilists and dying out. High intelligence and empathy are both accidents of evolution, NOT the result of long term evolutionary trends. Glitches in the matrix.
Jacob Ortiz
>People in pop science like to think of Evolution religiously as this constant refinement process creating better and better organisms over millions of years Most of them are creationists who claim that human evolution stopped 50k years ago
Landon Nguyen
Organisms are getting better, but you cant predict what they will become better at. If survival favours stupidity, your offspring will be retarded. Evolution doesnt strife for your ideal, it strives for its ideal. Survival. If your environment changes, you chagne with it - so that life will survive.
Eli Green
Great thread op.
Really interesting stuff. If only we could engineer these traits back into the "options pool" so to speak without creating Chimeras
The next step in our evolution is true artificial intelligence. We are simply the caterpillar for the butterfly.
>it is a geophysical process just like a tsunami or a hurricane yup. i think the metallization of the species is the most interesting direction. playing the 'rapid iterative testing' game of 're-evolution' might produce interesting adaptations but they'll go uncatalogued until another species like ourselves arrives.
Parker Williams
Did you not read a single thing OP said, you pedo-on-tour shitstain?
Interesting take. Given that many simple cell organisms thrive in the most unhostpitable enviroments and that humans (so called complex life) are busy arguing about trannies, I would be inclined to agree with you.
Leo Allen
Congratulations on finding out that evolution doesn't create progressively more powerful super mutant predator animals but instead just relatively boring things optimized for reproducing the most while requiring the least amount of energy. Your next step now is to read page 2 of an evolution textbook.
Benjamin Clark
It's good.
God is waiting for us to catch up. He is lonely.
Daniel Campbell
Evolution is a meme and dinos are fictional creations for children.
No, not just that. Evolution is LOSING its ability to create life over time, because it is losing its genetic potential, in the same way a ball loses its kinetic energy. I think conscious pro-mutation, what we could get done with genetic engineering, medicine and gene vaults, could not only correct this but could ultimately replace evolution as the primary force behind the transformation of living things.
Elijah Peterson
>nature always finds a way. Except this is gaia theory religious cope, not hard science. Evolution is just a physical process and extinction events are no different to wavebreakers in the face of a tsunami - they slow it down and kill it off. Terror birds could run at speeds of 100kph, a terrorbird alive today would easily become an apex predator, but no bird has evolved to resemble it since, because the primordial genetic potential the terrorbirds had, likely inherited from their theropod ancestors, is well and truely gone.
>No living creature today possesses this biomechanism, Most of what you described in your thread is because the changes in earth atmosphere, the 02 in earth was reduced, therefore animals had to adapt to thrive in a place with less oxygen and became smaller and weaker.
Raise the 02 in atmosphere again and you will see big animals again
